Rinari

Sep 4, 2016

I tried to like atom. I think it almost was workable. Being built from chrome,
it has a lot of the same limitations and weird issues as chrome. Particularly with window
managers, chrome plays a sad second class citizen, and I’ve never figured out
why it refuses to hide when I ask. I can get minimize, but not hide, and being unable to properly bury a window is confusing to me. But in the end I kept using emacs. Maybe its
motor memory of the keys, maybe it’s personal choice.

Once you make a decision, you should go all in. I tried to find what tools would make
ruby plus emacs a winning combination. I still long for something as slick as SLIME or CIDER are, and inferior-python works well enough – I can send a def block to the interpreter, and interact there. I tried rinari. So far it looks like it has the tools I need, it starts the webserver, can start both a db console and irb/rails console. I haven’t used much more than that, but freeing up my shell for other rails/rake tasks, and git, makes that a pleasure. Without this I would have been starting a terminal session and running rails server within a screen. I think having a buffer running the process is fine (as workable as screen is).

I separately got web-mode setup correctly, which was the missing part in the equation. Web-mode really rocks for template languages like erb or jinja/django templates, and makes mixing content like php so much more palatable. Rails had been a pain because of the lack of editor support for the template languages in html, and I think python based frameworks have the same issue. Now I get magic quotes, magic </ key sequences that close the closest open tag in the right order, and most importantly sane automatic indentation.

So right now the Ruby-mode, end, magit, and webmode seem to be the winning combination. Rinari adds some toys, but I think “Jump to Controller” or “Find View” are of limited value when ido-mode is already enabled. A first glance did not uncover a good/easy solution to setup autotest or to handle rspec output well, and I’m still running tests in a shell session. If I magically got rubocop to run as a save-buffer hook, that would be doubly annoying.